Silver Surfer

I find myself talking about it more and more with my wife. Within my circle of friends the subject keeps cropping up. And for my clients it is often a topic of discussion.

Age. Or the ageing process.

Lately I’ve found that a couple of stubby beers at 4% and a couple of glasses of wine on an evening is fairly excessive to me lately. My younger self would be calling me a lightweight. I’m happy to be a lightweight.

One too many these days can leave me feeling rubbish and it can ruin the next day. Long gone are the days of me partying on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights as a twenty something. It didn’t bother me then.

But as I got older my body gave me a little tap on the shoulder and told me to slow down. If I didn’t, it would let me know by feeling ill for the next 24 hours and, whether through having young children, running a business or simply just having a zest for life, I didn’t want to waste a day being so hungover that I was missing an important day. And that’s another thing you realize when you get to a certain age. Life’s too short. Sure, at 20, a day or two having duvet days due to excessive partying doesn’t seem to matter. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.

Age can’t be ignored though. The ‘whole life ahead of us’ thing at 20 seems like a much shorter route when you reach middle age. We do feel and think differently with age. Attitudes change. Aches and pains appear much more. We can’t escape the process. But the key here is this…we don’t need to accept it.

Dying. That’s what we all need to accept. But we all hope that it will be when we’re very old and we’ve lived a long and happy life before we get there. Being shackled by getting older, being defined by age, this is something that doesn’t have to be accepted.

I rarely teach fitness classes now, but when I did I promised my participants that I would give them what they came for. They deserved a top quality delivery that helped them towards their goals. A class on an early Tuesday morning would attract older people as opposed to a class on the evenings where it would bring in a younger demographic. However, I rarely changed the exercises or the intensity in the morning to how I would approach an evening class. I found that there were many people in their 70’s who were very capable of keeping up with a lively barbell class just as the younger group could.

If I slowed the music down, created easier exercises and spoke to the older people like they were some ‘old dear’ in a retirement home, then they would, over time, become the old dear in a retirement home.

If you tell someone something over a period of time there’s a good chance they start to believe it. Also, similarly with the body. Under perform it and the body gives in to what it has been taught to do. Underperform.

“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Jon Kabat-Zinn.

When your body begins to tell you something about ageing that you should know, you need to listen. The waves get higher as we get older. Instead of regressing to the toddler’s paddling pool in defeat, I’m going to try and ride out those waves. For sure, sometimes I’ll fall into the sea. But if I keep the challenge interesting, fun and with set goals then I am giving myself a chance to thrive as I age.

There’s no doubt that there will be tweaks to be made as we age. Wear and tear is real! But the earlier we can strengthen muscle, bones and joints, the easier it is to deal with general ageing wear and tear. If we fail to address these issues early enough then the body, through the ageing process, will pick up on them. I’d recommend listening to your body before it happens.

The only certainty in life is death and in the western world we are living longer than ever. This is great. However, it means that in many circumstances, our chances of living the final 20 years of our lives with any meaningful quality and dignity are decreasing.

That is, unless, you learn how to surf.